Thanks for your earlier reply, Tom.
What I did was:
Stop the server: service postgresql stop
Remove the directory tree completely: rm -rf /var/lib/pgsql
Restore the full tree:
/bin/cp -r /bup/previous/var/lib/pgsql /var/lib/pgsql
Ensure postgres owns all:
chown postgres:postgres -R /var/lib/pgsql
Restart the server: service postgresql restart
At this point I can once again access the original data base
and \l shows it correctly, but \d shows no relations.
I can create a new table, but I am not at all confident that I can have
it present in the routine directory/file backups.
Don't understand why that is, nor where to focus my search to find the
problem.
George